Topic 98: honoria in ciberspazio

As you say, Scott, "cyberrelationships are especially
vulnerable to illusions and false expectations." That is what the
plot is based upon. The unique mysteries that internet relationships
are based on is the story line of the libretto.
Bookish is the only character to run off with his clone but all the
characters are definitely seduced (except one) in the electronic dance
of desire. The dramaturge and the artistic director can decide how the
clones are realized. In several dramatized readings modern dancers
danced the clones. The dances have been very sexy including a powerful
and hypnotic male strip by Bryan Green. In one scene of the opera the
character .rez dances around a fire and strips to his soul.
Ciberspazio is a place that can be staged in any number of ways
incorporating metaphors for the web and electronic communication.
Three props are actually dictated by the story but everything else is
open for interpretation. The first prop is a large lava lamp. The
clones are born from the lamp. The lava lamp represents the pre-net
communities of the 60's and liquid identity of the net. The second prop
is the fire which is the age-old human gathering place and represents
the fire of electrons and the heat of passion. The third prop is a
gondola in the last scene. The gondola represents the marriage of
technology, history, and buoyant beauty.
So the clones can be represented as concrete real people, abstract
desires, dreams or combinations. The story does not say what they are.
I look forward to seeing how the clones will be realized.

Kafclown,
Your ideas are great. Recently Yacov Sharir, the director of a modern
dance company in Austin has agreed to produce the cyberopera, probably
in the 2001-2002 season. Yacov has been incorporating high tech
design in his dancework for years. He is looking for partnership with
an opera company. He gave the libretto to a dramaturge who has agreed
to work on it -- so it looks like we will be able to see some more
singing and less reading and recitals. I'm sure sensual dancing will
also be incorporated into the performance.

Congratulations! That sounds like wonderful news.
Is .rez one of the clones or one of the main characters? Stripping to
your soul is an interesting image -- but is it someone stripping to his
soul online, or a clone convincing someone else that he's stripping to
his soul -- just presenting yet another mask that he hopes is what the
other person wants to see?
I'm also curious about something kafclown asked about: What do you
think might be some of the changes made as you turn this into a work
for the stage? What do you think it is about the work in its present
form that keeps it from being staged as it is? You say you've already
had some readings and recitals -- can you tell us something about them,
how they worked, and what you learned from them?

.rez is one of the characters, not a clone. He's an impulsive and
passionate young man who seeks a life partner in his clone. A person
who loved .rez wrote the fire dance aria about .rez and one of many
times their virtual community met in real life.
One season I saw baritone Leroy Villanueva perform in the Austin Lyric
Opera and I could clearly see him in the role of .rez. I found his
email address and contacted him. He gave me the name of his agent. I
called his agent in NY who said that Mr. Villanueva had heard of the
cyberopera and would like to workshop it with us. At that time I
didn't realize just how far in the future the workshopping might be.
But I felt I had to tell the agent about .rez's fire dance aria. The
agent said, "Let me get this right -- you want Leroy to do a strip?" I
replied, "Not just a strip, I want Leroy to strip to his SOUL." His
agent said, "Oh Leroy can do THAT," in a way that implied Leroy could
do the impossible quite naturally. I could tell by Leroy's strong
acting and aethleticism on stage that he could pull off both the fire
dance and the aria. Bryan Green has danced the stip to the soul and it
was very beautiful. .rez himself performed a dramatic reading of the
scene in the original webcast and in the wetware reading. Bruce Cane is
going to sing .rez in the next recital and he is eager to see the
score develop to the fire aria to see what the part might require. It
will be interesting to stage.

-- What do you think it is about the work in its present form that
keeps it from being staged as it is?
The work is in a form that was developed by people who do not know the
demands of a libretto. For example, that must be sung as music and
tell a story performed as a drama. The text collection and its editing
were done with a view that the result would be an opera, but with a
naive view of actual elements of a good libretto. Originally it was a
one semester project but over time so many people have worked on it I
feel a sense of responsibility to do my best to see it staged. It is
ready to transfer into the hands of a professional. Yacov has the
theatrical knowledge and connections to bring the story off the screen
and onto the stage.
-- What changes will be made to turn the cyberopera into a work for
the stage?
The libretto needs narrative development. I am eager to see how
dramatists and directors will work with the material. I'm sure it will
be changed a lot from what it is now but I think most of the arias will
remain. The story will be tightened and refined.
-- You say you've already had some readings and recitals -- can you
tell us something about them, how they worked, and what you learned
from them?
READINGS: There have been five readings of the whole libretto with ten
people taking the parts of the four humans, their four clones, the
oracle, and the cyborg. We did the readings to see the story
development process and also to webcast the opera's progress. We
learned a lot from each reading, for example if the dialog was working,
if the arias were in the right places, to give composer George a
chance to see the whole plot, etc.
RECITALS: The first recital we called geurilla opera. We set up a
booth in the tradeshow of the SXSW Technology Conference and produced
a ten minute webcast from the showroom without asking permission. That
was really fun. It shocked our tradeshow neighbors when the singing
commenced. There are some quicktime clips of it on the website with
Janet Davidson singing and Bryan Green dancing. The next year we won
the Texas Interactive Award at SXSW and the following year the
cyberopera opened the SXSW Interactive Festival by invitation with the
recital that kafclown mentioned. We've learned to appreciate the
complexity of opera productions and to strive to interest professional
opera producers in the cyberopera.

Honoria, could you talk about how .rez and others in the opera relate to
real persons who were involved in the creation of the piece, including the
character honoria, how she relates to the person honoria, and perhaps how
the person honoria relates to Madelyn Starbuck? I've always been
fascinated by the aspect of fluid identity in your various projects.

Hi Jon,
Welcome back. Hope your holidays are very fun.
The characters in the opera all relate to the personalities of their
real human counterparts. .rez is an idealistic and passionate young
man with very romantic ideas about relationships. Much of the .rez
character was written by the leri group, the online community that the
real .rez belonged to when I met him. Sandy is based on Sandy Stone.
Her character is a muscian and philosopher. Sandy's text was written by
several of her students and other people who know her. Bookish is an
intellectual who lives in Ohio. I met him once. He lives for
bookstores, in fact, he now owns one, Pauper's Books in Bolling Green.
The text for bookish was written by a number of people who are
theorists in communications and networks. We used these real
personalities to collate the text that we received. If the poetry just
sounded right for bookish, or for the oracle we applied it to that
character and worked out the sequence and story gradually as the
personalities' text accumulated.
The honoria character is based on me as an artist venturing into the
online world from the art world, specifically the international snail
mail linked world of correspondence art. Honoria experiences the other
characters and clones with a certain detatchment and watches patterns
emerge. The whole opera may be her dream or her creation or she may be
the dream or creation of the oracle/cyborg. But at the end the dream,
whosever it was comes true in a moment of color truth and beauty.
Honoria was a name I chose when I started my life as a networker in a
pen pal club, then in mail art. She came from Dorothy L. Sayers
wonderful 1930's murder mystery series. She was Lord Peter Whimsy's
mother, the Dowager Duches of Denver, who liked to write letters and
frequently misused words in a witty way and had no worries about money.
honoria was a natural extension of that persona for my online persona
too but she was part of my life/lives before my online experiences.
She came to me at a time when I was too busy to just be one person
acting as both an artist and as head of household. So I split the two
jobs into the two characters. Honoria is the artist and risk-taker.
Madelyn is the person who holds everything together and pays the bills.
It's easier to have the two of us handling things instead of just one
multi-multi-tasking person. I recommend split personalitying
yourself, especially if you are going to tackle big projects that last
for years. I have some other personalities that come in handy when I
need to have some other voices. They would have been here too but
Madelyn won't let them all have well accounts.
Since honoria handles all the opera stuff she ends up doing Madelyn
type things like writing proposals and paying for things like honoraria
for singers, sound equipment, and fees. She is not built for
administrivia and can't wait to unload that part of the production to
professionals but she's learned a lot in the process. For years
honoria has been the main character in Madelyn's life. Many people
don't know honoria has another name.

Since this is the last day of this interview I'd like to thank Scott
and Jon for asking such interesting questions. I'm looking forward to
Bruce Sterling's interview next year/millennium on the morrow.
ciao! and happy new year!!!

Cyberopera News!!!
Lovesong & fleurish, honoria
-----------------------------------------------------
From: Allucquere Rosanne Stone <sandy@sandystone.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 02:21:17 -0500
Subject: discuss: WAY TO GO, HONORIA!
From April 18th to 23rd, Valencia, Spain becomes the Shakespeare
capital of
the world, and our own Honoria's cyberopera "Honoria in Ciberspazio"
(http://www.cyberopera.org) was chosen to be the most important event
in
the opening ceremony of the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress.
Now, as of this evening, even better news has arrived.
The Fura Dels Baus, previously described in a posting here a few days
ago,
has accepted an offer to make "Honoria in Ciberspazio" into their
eighth
artistic project. During the World Shakespeare Congress, twenty-five
actors, musicians and dancers, twelve technicians, and twenty-five
Valencian students under the direction of Charles Padrissa (Fura Dels
Baus)
and Vicente Forés (University of Valencia) will develop a complete
musical
score online as specified in Honoria's original proposal, and the
libretto
will be translated into most of the languages that will be spoken at
the
Congress. Professor Flores comments: "They used to translate
Shakespeare;
now "Honoria" will change their lives."
"Honoria in Ciberspazio" was workshopped as an ACTLab and
CWRL University of Texas at Austin project and had its
premiere webcast in 1995 before webcasts as we know them existed, as a
CU-SeeMe transmission originating from a makeshift proscenium stage in
Sandy Stone's living room. Online interest was so great that our
primitive
servers buckled under the load. The original cast included John
Slatin as
the Blind Prophet of Cyberspace; Sandy Stone as the Cyborg; Linda
Montano
as Sandy Stone; Scott Alton Dulaney as Honoria; Geoffry Thomas as
Bookish;
Heath Rezabek as Rez; also starring Bryan Green, Justin Smith, Heather
Kelley Leeway, Barna Kantor, Knut Graf, Ryan Goertz, and (shortly)
George
Oldziey. Subsequently, the opera has been webcast and performed live
many
times. It has won more awards than can be mentioned here.
Over the years other organizations have attempted to lay claim to the
title
"First Opera in Cyberspace". "Honoria in Ciberspazio" still precedes
the
earliest of them by more than a year.
An ACTLab contingent, led by Honoria herself, will be present in
Valencia
for the unveiling of the new project. Broadcast and webnews are
scheduled
for Thursday, April 19th and Friday, April 20th from 11:00 a.m. to
2:00
p.m. and from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Here's kudos to Honoria for the vision and persistence to bring to
fruition
a groundbreaking, worldchanging idea. And the fun's just beginning.
*** THEY USED TO TRANSLATE SHAKESPEARE ***
*** NOW HONORIA WILL CHANGE THEIR LIVES ***
--- Take Risks -- Make Stuff -- Think Convergent Media ---

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